This is by design. HN tries to avoid controversial matters being discussed. The entire point of this discussion forum is to create value for YC by attracing/feeding potentential founders into their vortex. Political controversy is not good for business.

Even if something has hundreds of upvotes, it seems like all it takes is maybe 3-5 flags to get it buried. This is pathethic and needs to be called out at a larger scale.

That's not quite right. We're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity. The most interesting HN is the most valuable HN. There's no business objective beyond that (excepting the handful of formal things that HN explicitly gives back to YC in exchange for funding it, like job ads and Launch HNs for YC startups).

Plenty of politically controversial topics get discussed here. But it's also the case that many politically inflammatory threads are just not intellectually interesting. The people doing the bashing on both sides feel very strongly about it, but the majority of the audience here tunes out in tedium.

Case in point: internet bickering about Antifa. This is lame.

Well, this is very subjective, and I am afraid if many people with <X> agenda are reading a <Y> thread, its very easy to have flagged sensible(potentially interesting) comments not because of intellectual value, but because they're disliked. Not sure how to fix

This post was flagged soon after it was posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21890328

It informed people in a quite polite manner that there was a particular political alignment factor to this event. Many people commented and were thus apparently were interrested in the topic.

Is this lame? I don't get it.

I think you should at least increase the number of flag actions required to bury something (or better yet, rework the entire system from the ground up) - as it stands it's way too easy for political opponents to bury something they don't like. The Hong Kong-related threads have also illustrated this.

The bottom line: it's way too easy to kill information posted on HN.